Mars Mission Is Next Step in Intensifying Middle East Space Race
U.A.E. Minister for Advanced Sciences Sarah Al Amiri gives a talk in Dubai in 2015 to discuss planning for the Arab world’s first space probe to Mars.
Photographer: Kamran Jebreili/AP Photo
On the afternoon of Sept. 25 last year, Hazza Al Mansouri walked a gantlet of camera phone-wielding well-wishers at Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. In step to his left were Russian commander Oleg Skripochka, a veteran on his third mission, and American flight engineer Jessica Meir, a first-timer like Mansouri. Their white-and-blue Sokol spacesuits made them appear hunched and ungainly, the communication caps covering all but a patch of face—in Mansouri’s case, dark eyes, a close-cropped beard, and most of a prominent forehead. Ahead of the astronauts were 160 vertical feet of a Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft and the elevator that would take them to its very tip.
Mansouri waved to his wife and three children. They’d said goodbyes earlier that day through the glass of the quarantine complex where astronauts spend two weeks before launch. Not being able to hug had been difficult, given the risks of what Mansouri was about to do. The previous October, a booster for another Soyuz craft, MS-10, had failed a few minutes after liftoff, forcing the crew to eject and parachute back to Earth in a shower of debris.